The Siege (18 page)

‘My father was wounded defending the Motherland. He can’t even get out of bed,’ she says. ‘How do you think he can possibly know anything?’

How strange to hear herself talking of the Motherland, using words that belong on posters, not in real life. And yet she means it. Words are regaining their meanings, after years of masquerade. Hunger means hunger, terror means terror, enemy means enemy. It’s not like trying to read mirror-writing any more. Everything gets clearer day by day, as siege and winter eat into their lives. The coils of Soviet life are losing their strength. There’s only the present left, and it has burned away both past and future. There’s only the dark, besieged, freezing city, and the Germans outside, dug into their winter positions, waiting, stamping their feet.

But they will never come in. Her friend in the Party was right. We will destroy everything, we will blow up our own city and let it burn as we let Moscow burn before Napoleon. We’ve mined bridges, steelworks, palaces and power stations. If we have to, we’ll press the buttons that detonate those fuses. Once Anna saw an apartment building dynamited, because it was in the way of a new road. In the second of detonation it hung in the air, silent, holding shape like a mirage of itself. Then the noise of the blast rolled over it and flattened it.

We will do that. We will eat horses and pigeons and dogs, we will burn our books and our furniture, we will consume ourselves rather than be consumed.

‘I’m sorry, Anna Mikhailovna, I didn’t mean anything –’

She’s terrified I won’t give her the sugar now. No, it’s more than that. She really is sorry. I have got to stop being so suspicious of everyone.

‘I’ll go and get that sugar. And thanks again for letting us use your axe. I’ll bring you your share of the wood once we’ve finished chopping up the dressing-table.’

‘A dressing-table – how nice! I’ve always wanted one of those.’

‘It was my mother’s.’

At the thought of the dressing-table, Zina’s eyes fill for the first time with tears of weakness.

‘It doesn’t seem right, does it, all this?’

‘You go and lie down. When I come back with the sugar I’ll knock on the door twice so you know it’s me. Tuck him in beside you, and open the shawl so he gets the warmth of your body. They can’t maintain their body temperature as we can.’

She sounds like Fedya, thinks Zina. So sure of herself, and knowing things, and having the right words. But it’s different with Anna, because I can understand what she says. I don’t keep drifting off.

In the apartment the
burzhuika
is burning strongly, eating up Anna’s schoolbooks.

‘It’s getting hot!’ shouts Kolya as she comes into the room. Her father is on the sofa, swaddled in blankets. On the floor Marina has pushed together the big mattress and Kolya’s little mattress. She is busy heaping them with blankets, pillows and shawls. In the light of the candle-stub, huge shadows of Marina leap from wall to wall. It is five o’clock.

Anna goes to the kitchen with a spill of paper lit from the candle, lights another stub, and opens the store-cupboard. There’s the last bag of sugar. Without allowing herself to think about what she’s doing, she opens it carefully, and measures a hundred grammes into a cup.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Oh! – Marina. You nearly made me spill it. I’m just measuring some sugar.’

‘For whom?’ Marina raps out.

‘For the baby next door. Zina’s baby. He’s starving.’

Marina is silent while Anna refolds the top of the sugar bag. Then she says, with cold certainty, You can’t do that.’

‘I’ve got to. He’s malnourished, and he’s dehydrated. In this cold he could easily die.’

Marina draws herself up. ‘So what are you going to do about it, Anna? What about all those other babies? Are you going to trawl up and down the street knocking on doors until you’ve given away all our food to people who are going to die? And then you can come home and watch Kolya die.’

‘It’s only a hundred grammes.’

‘A hundred grammes is a hundred grammes. It’s not “only” anything.’

‘But Zina’s our neighbour. We can hear the baby crying. She’s only across the landing, and she hasn’t got a clue what to do. He’s going to go to sleep and not wake up at all if he doesn’t get some calories into his body soon.’

Marina lays her hand on Anna’s arm. Her voice changes, taking on a seductive, vibrant,’ cello-note that Anna has not heard before.

‘Anna,’ she says, ‘you are the ones who matter. You and Kolya. Don’t you understand that?’

‘Only us?’

‘You still don’t see, do you, what it’s going to be like? You still don’t understand. It’s going to go on like this, getting colder and colder, and with less and less food. No one’s going to come and help us. And I don’t intend to watch you all die.’

‘You might die first.’ A grin stretches her face. She can’t really be standing here with Marina, talking about their own deaths. She can’t really want to burst out laughing.

‘People don’t die just when they want to. I’m the type who’ll go on to the end. It’s pure selfishness, you’re quite right. I can’t face seeing you die one by one before me. So put the sugar back in the bag.’

Marina’s eyes glow in the light of the candle-stub. Anna can’t read them, but they draw her in. She wants, suddenly, more than anything, to yield and become what Marina wants. She wants to be carried on the warm wave of Marina’s voice. To let Marina decide. They are almost touching, in the tiny space of the kitchen. She wants to give in, and Marina knows it. It’s like sex. The other person always knows.

But the baby cries. In spite of his weakness, the cry is piercing. It is like Kolya’s cry. She would get up in the night to him, sick with tiredness, those first days after Vera died. She didn’t know the first thing about babies then.

‘No,’ says Anna, with stiff, clumsy lips. ‘I can’t do that. I’ve told Zina she can have a hundred grammes. But that’ll be the end of it. She’ll have to manage on her own after this. Everything else is for Kolya.’

Marina has drawn back. It’s over. ‘Even if she comes knocking on the door with that baby?’

‘Even if she does.’

‘Good. Because you have a responsibility, you know.’

‘To what?’

Anna is sure she knows the answer. Marina will say that her responsibility is to Kolya, and to her father. But she doesn’t. Instead she looks closely at Anna and says, ‘To stay alive, of course.’

To what?
thinks Anna later, when the sugar is gone, and the candle is burning down. But the
burzhuika
really does give out some heat, now that she’s been able to feed it with wood. Kolya’s looking better already. And tomorrow she’ll attack the other half of the dressing-table. She couldn’t do it all at once. The effort of chopping the wood made her heart beat so fast that she thought she would vomit. Marina made her sit down and take valerian drops.

She is drawing. Kolya is asleep, curled on his mattress close to the stove. Anna has a stick of willow charcoal, and she is drawing Marina as she sits by the sofa, reading to Anna’s father.
A responsibility – but to what?
thinks Anna again. What did Marina really mean? To stay alive is not enough, if everything else has gone. She’s right about that. I should have waited, and helped Tanya to climb the canal steps, but I couldn’t do it. I had to get home, and carry the stove upstairs.

Her father lies still, with his eyes closed, but Anna knows he is awake. Marina is reading a Shakespeare play, in English, which she speaks better than any of them. It is
A Winter’s Tale.
Anna can understand some of it, but she’s not really listening. She has cut out the too-seductive sound of Marina’s voice, so that she can draw. Her fingers are clumsy with cold, even though she’s wearing a pair of old woollen gloves. Their tips are cut off, because she can’t draw with gloved fingers. She draws with long, firm strokes. Tonight, the charcoal seems not just to sweep the paper, but to understand every grain of it.

How strange it is that she should be drawing Marina’s portrait now. Marina’s face is so much changed, or maybe it’s Anna’s perception which has changed. Marina does not look beautiful. Her glasses perch on her nose, and she wrinkles up her eyes to focus on the text in the poor light of the candle. Her eyes are watering. Anna knows she’s worried about her eyesight. From time to time she stops reading, and fixes Anna’s father with a long look, as ruthlessly protective as the stare of a hawk circling its nest, scouring the sky for danger to its young.

She loves him. Of course she does. It’s as simple as that. She has loved him in this way, and he has loved her in another. She is his dear and brilliant friend, of whom he has always been very slightly afraid. But she loves him. It’s been going on for years, nearly twenty years, way back before Kolya’s birth, back to when Marina tried to make herself into a dear friend of their mother’s, too. But Vera wouldn’t let her. Vera refused to be party to any of it. She would never collude. How strange it all is, how painful and lopsided.

But when you look at Marina, you can’t help believing that this is the only way she could ever have loved. There would always have to be something impossible at the core of it.

And I would never have known about it, if it hadn’t been for all this. She would have remained my father’s old friend, wonderful actress, beautiful too, you know, in her time. You should have seen her, but of course these days…

I would never have folded blankets with her, hand to hand. I would have drawn her portrait at her dacha, and never known her at all.

It has got to be a double portrait. Her father, and Marina. Rapidly, Anna sketches the sofa, the outline of her father’s body blurred by its pile of covers, the sharp edges of nose and jaw, the sunken hollows of his eyes. She draws his protruding eyeballs, with the veined skin of his eyelids sealed down over them. She draws the angle of Marina’s neck as she fixes her gaze on him again. The poise of that head closes a circle which contains only Marina, and the man lying on the sofa. One hand holds the pages of her Shakespeare, the other rests on the pillow, close to his shrunken cheek.

Anna draws on. She shapes the pointed shadows that spring out on the wall behind Marina. She draws the patchwork blanket which is drawn up under her father’s chin. She knitted that blanket herself, coloured square by coloured square, before Kolya was born. It wrapped him on his first outing. Her fingers remember the warmth and scratchiness of the wools. It was spring, and cold. She held Kolya awkwardly, not yet used to him, as she walked in the park. The black buds were swollen, bursting with leaf. The baby screwed up his eyes against the strong spring light.

She draws on. The stove sighs as a lump of wood collapses into ash. Soon its warmth will be gone. Quickly, quickly, before her fingers stiffen, she draws her father’s jawbone.

Only Anna hears two taps at the outer door. She gets up, putting her drawing aside. It can’t be Andrei, because he’s already said he won’t be able to come tonight. Perhaps it’s Zina. Something wrong with the baby again.

But it’s Andrei, pale, with soot marks on his face.

‘What’s happened?’

‘That crazy idiot Borya made a fire in our apartment, and then he fell asleep and it went through to the floorboards. They managed to put it out, but the smoke’s wrecked everything. Both mattresses caught fire.’

‘Oh my God. Is Borya all right?’

‘He’s inhaled smoke, so he’s not feeling too good. But he’ll survive. The Antonovs will take him in.’

‘He didn’t lose his ration card?’

‘No.’

Without a ration card, you die for certain. It’s as simple as that. With one, you may die too, but the land of not-dying remains open to you. Andrei stares down at her with his Siberian eyes. Even when he’s as kicked-in as he is now, he still seems to bring with him the taste of a different, more open-handed air. She rests her mouth on his cold cheek, which smells of smoke. Her lips open. She tastes him.

‘You can stay here. Of course you can. But it’s too far for you to walk all the way to the hospital from here. Surely they’d give you a bed there?’

He seizes her and holds her. He is trembling all over. He’s stalled with exhaustion, and then the shock of the fire and finding everything gone.

‘All the way I was thinking what I would do if you weren’t here.’

‘Where else should I be?’

‘I know. But anything can happen these days. I suppose I could find a cot somewhere at the hospital, but it’s so full. We’ve got patients on the floor, in the corridors, jammed up next to dead bodies.’

‘You can stay here. We’ll work everything else out later. Come on in. My father and Kolya are sleeping, but Marina’s awake. You wouldn’t believe how warm it is now we’ve got the
burzhuika?

She takes him in, and moves her drawing off the arm of her chair. Andrei sits down, closing his eyes.

‘He’s staying here,’ says Anna to Marina. ‘He hasn’t anywhere else. His room’s been burnt out.’

Marina nods silently. Then, in the voice that still comes clear from her shrunken mouth, she continues to read from the play:

‘Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach;

Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come:

I’ll fill your grave up: stir; nay, come away;

Bequeath to death your numbness …’

‘Feel in my pocket,’ says Andrei.

‘Your coat pocket?’

‘Yes.’

His coat is cold. She reaches into the pocket, and brings out a jar.

‘What is it?’